TY - CHAP A1 - Toepler, Stefan A1 - Anheier, Helmut K. ED - Bassi, Andrea ED - Aquino Alves, Mario ED - Cordery, Carolyn T1 - Third-Sector Research: Ubi eras, Quo vadis? T2 - The Future of Third Sector Research: From Theory to Definitions, Classifications and Aggregation Towards New Research Paths N2 - Third Sector, or nonprofit, research has made tremendous strides since the field's inception half a century ago in the context of developed liberal market economies. In the US, an interdisciplinary group of social scientists started to form in the early 1970s that was originally primarily concerned with local voluntary initiatives, self-help and other grassroots amateur groups, or what David Horton Smith (Smith, 2016) later referred to as voluntaristics. Subsequent economic theorizing (cf. Hansmann, 1987) pushed research agendas towards examinations of more formal nonprofit organizations. In Europe, related, yet different, research traditions at the time focused on associational life, cooperative and communal economics, and the social economy, encompassing a variety of cooperative and mutual enterprises. By contrast, in the countries of the Global South, where colonial legal frameworks were superimposed on indigenous legal systems, organizational forms and cultures, remained outside the focus of these initial efforts. Y1 - 2025 SN - 9783031678967 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-67896-7_20 SP - 229 EP - 248 PB - Springer CY - Cham ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Toepler, Stefan A1 - Anheier, Helmut K. ED - List, Regina A. ED - Anheier, Helmut K. ED - Toepler, Stefan T1 - Theories of Nonprofit Sector, Economic T2 - International Encyclopedia of Civil Society KW - Civil Society KW - Sociology Y1 - 2024 SN - 978-3-319-99675-2 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99675-2_805-1 PB - Springer ER -